Doug Cowen

Doug Cowen

A massive telescope buried in the Antarctic ice has detected 28 extremely high-energy neutrinos -- elementary particles that likely originate outside our solar system. Two of these neutrinos had energies many thousands of times higher than the highest-energy neutrino that any man-made particle accelerator has ever produced, according to a team of IceCube Neutrino Observatory researchers that includes Penn State scientists. These new record-breaking neutrinos had energies greater than 1,000,000,000,000,000 volts or, as the scientists say, 1 peta-electron volt (PeV).

IceCube, the world's largest observatory ever built to detect the elusive sub-atomic particles called neutrinos, has just been completed in the crystal-clear ice at the South Pole. Trillions of neutrinos stream through the human body at any given moment, but they rarely interact with regular matter, and researchers want to know more about them. The observatory provides an innovative means to investigate the sources and properties of neutrinos, which originate in some of the most spectacular phenomena in the universe.

Bundled in brightly colored cold-weather gear, Doug Cowen, professor of physics and astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, boards a small, noisy cargo plane in Christchurch, New Zealand. "Christchurch is hot enough without a coat made of goose down," Cowen says, but he needs the warm attire for the tail-end of the turbulent eleven-hour flight. The plane's destination is the South Pole.